Chapter 2 :One Thousand Dollars

Chapter 2: Chapter 2 :One Thousand Dollars

Twenty minutes before the Fifth Third branch on Main Street closed for the weekend, Ethan was at the counter.

The teller was a woman in her fifties with her reading glasses on a beaded chain. Her name tag said LINDA. She looked at the withdrawal slip, then at him.

"A thousand. All in twenties?"

"All in twenties."

"College expenses?"

"Something like that. Higher education is very expensive, Linda."

"Honey, every boy who says that has a new subwoofer in his car the next day."

"No subwoofer. Scout’s honor."

"You quit Scouts after two meetings. Your mother told me." She counted anyway. Once, then again. Fifty bills, squared into a stack and slid into a white bank envelope too fat to seal.

The receipt showed the new balance: $757.18.

Almost half of everything he owned, in one envelope.

He didn’t know yet exactly where the money would go. He only knew it couldn’t sit in a checking account.

Back home, his parents were loading the Ford Explorer. Ethan went around to the garage.

Half the garage was parts that wouldn’t fit in his father’s shop. The other half was twenty years of things this family had never thrown away. He moved a tangle of Christmas lights off the top shelf, and behind it was a black nylon bag.

A Sony Handycam. Bought in 2003 for his cousin’s wedding and used exactly twice: the wedding, and one trip to Cedar Point. It took MiniDV tapes, not much bigger than a matchbox. The lens cap had a white scratch across it from the day it hit the concrete in the line for the Magnum.

There was still a tape inside, labeled in his mother’s handwriting: Cedar Point 04. In the side pocket, one blank Maxell, still in the plastic. Sixty minutes. One battery, the original.

Ethan looked at the battery for a couple of seconds.

He remembered this battery. At his high school graduation, his father had filmed the whole ceremony on it, and the screen had gone black somewhere around the thirtieth name. There was no footage of Ethan crossing the stage. His mother brought it up for years.

New battery. More tapes. There had to be a Best Buy near campus. He made a mental note, ejected the old tape onto the shelf, loaded the blank one, and plugged the battery into the charger.

"That’s my camera."

David was standing in the garage door with a roll of packing tape.

"Can I borrow it?"

"For what?"

"School. Media major. I can’t show up with nothing but a toothbrush and opinions."

David looked at him, then at the camera, like he was trying to work out what it had to do with tuition. Then he came over, picked up the lens cap, and rubbed the scratch with his thumb.

"Red light means it’s recording. Your mother got forty minutes of her own shoes at Cedar Point." He snapped the cap back on. "Bring it back in one piece."

"One piece. Maybe a few new scratches. Gives it character."

"It’s got plenty of character."

His father went back to the car. He walked easy, shoulders loose, like a man who believed he’d just done something big for his family. The guarantee was in a drawer in the upstairs bedroom. Ethan knew exactly which one.

He zipped the bag shut.

?

Southern Coast University was two thousand miles from home. They left before dinner on Friday and did it in two long days.

I-70 west, then I-40. A Days Inn outside St. Louis, another in Albuquerque. Gas station hot dogs. His father refusing to hand over the wheel until somewhere in New Mexico, his mother asleep against the window with the road atlas open on her lap.

Eighty-nine days turned into eighty-eight somewhere in the Arizona dark.

After two days of interstate, the Explorer finally pulled into the unloading zone outside Carver Hall.

Cardboard boxes everywhere, mini-fridges, laundry baskets full of hangers. An upperclassman by the door was yelling "Three, go left, four, go right," and his voice was already gone. Somebody down the hall was playing "Crazy" by Gnarls Barkley. That summer, every dorm in America had probably played it.

Room 314. Two trips.

His mother checked the room twice, mattress, window lock, outlets, before she finally gave up and pulled him into a hug.

"Call home."

"Every Sunday."

"Before you run out of money."

"So, Tuesday."

She laughed and swatted his arm, then stepped back and looked at him. "I’m serious."

"So am I." His tone didn’t change, but he held her eyes. "And if anything happens at home, anything at all, you call me. Don’t make it sound small."

Sarah blinked. "What would happen at home?"

"Nothing. Humor me."

She searched his face, trying to work out what was different about this kid. Then she hugged him again, harder than the first time.

David clapped him on the shoulder and glanced at the nylon bag on the desk. "One piece."

"One piece. I heard you the first four times."

He stood at the window and watched the Explorer back out, turn at the light, and disappear. He had stood at this window once before, twenty years ago by his own count, and all he’d felt was free. This time he saw the car his father had washed that morning, his mother’s arm resting on the open window, and a house that, in three months, might not be theirs anymore.

"You Ethan?"

He turned around.

The other bed was already taken. Light-brown hair that looked like someone had just dragged him out of bed by it, a faded Seahawks T-shirt, one sneaker on, the other buried under a pile of clothes. A ring of keys spinning around one finger.

Noah Parker.

Eighteen-year-old Noah Parker. It hit Ethan harder than he’d expected.

The first time around, they’d roomed together all four years.

That Christmas, Ethan came home to find the house gone. Back at school, Noah was the first one he told. For the rest of that semester, it was Noah who kept dragging him out of the editing room to eat.

In 2010, Noah called. He was starting a video channel. Did Ethan want in? By then Ethan was juggling three shooting and editing gigs at once and sleeping four hours a night. He barely had time to call back. And he didn’t dare. A steady paycheck was the only floor his family had left, and he wasn’t about to pull it out to bet on something nobody understood yet. Maybe later, he said.

There was no later. Work swallowed him whole. They talked a little less every year, until it was one text on birthdays.

Before Ethan had decided on anything, his mouth had. "You already took the bed by the window, and you’re going to pretend you never saw the room assignment sheet."

He crossed the room in two steps and hooked an arm around Noah’s neck. "Off. That one’s mine."

"Hey—hey—first come, first served! First come, first served!" Noah was laughing too hard to breathe, swinging the key ring blindly behind him. "It’s dorm law! Article one of dorm law!"

"Who wrote dorm law?"

"Me! Just now!"

They went down in a tangle, knocked a box off the bed, and sent clothes everywhere. Noah finally broke loose and stepped back, still breathing hard, his hair worse than before.

Then he stopped and looked Ethan up and down. "Wait. Do we know each other? Because we’ve known each other for, like, ten minutes."

"Ten seconds."

"Ten seconds! And you’ve already got me in a headlock!"

"You’ve got a very headlockable face." Ethan nodded at the door, where the RA had taped up two name cards. "Also, your name’s on the door."

"Oh. Right." Noah grinned. "For a second I thought you were psychic."

"If I were psychic, I’d have gotten here first."

Noah laughed. Ethan remembered that laugh. Noah had always talked like silence was something that needed fixing.

"You get your school email yet?" Noah turned an old ThinkPad around to show him. "Facebook only lets you in with a .edu address. I’ve been refreshing for an hour. I have four friends. One of them is the RA."

The screen showed that blue-and-white page, small and almost too clean, from before the News Feed existed. In a month it would open to everyone. In a few years, Noah’s four friends would turn into four hundred, and then into half the planet.

"Whatever. Later." Noah shut the laptop. "You going to the welcome thing? Main quad, like, now." He paused. "There’s free pizza."

Ethan stood up. "You should’ve led with that."

"I knew we’d get along."

On the way out, Ethan moved the Handycam from its nylon bag into his backpack, right next to the bank envelope.

They could hear the crowd before they’d even made it around the library. Around the corner, the main quad was packed.

Club booths in a long row. Student government handing out CLASS OF 2010 T-shirts. Frat guys pushing flyers. Fergie coming out of a speaker somewhere. The astronomy club had a hand-painted sign on their table, RIP PLUTO 1930–2006, and a bowl of candy you could only take from if you signed a petition. Three days ago a roomful of scientists in Prague had voted Pluto out of the planets, and it was already the most popular joke of welcome week.

Noah vanished for two minutes and came back with a slice of pizza in each hand.

"I take back everything I ever said about tuition."

"You haven’t paid any tuition yet. Your parents have."

"Don’t ruin this for me."

Then shouting from the middle of the lawn.

There was a temporary stage set up there, about waist high. On it stood a six-foot plywood pelican in a sailor’s cap, grinning: Captain Pete, the Southern Coast mascot. Five freshmen each had one hand pressed flat against it. A foam board at the edge of the stage read:

LAST HAND ON WINS $25

The host was a sophomore in a yellow orientation polo, KEVIN on his name tag, and the mic in his hand was shaking.

The game had been going for forty minutes. The trouble started when one of the girls, long dark curls, white tank top, shifted her weight and her palm came off the pelican for maybe half a second before she slapped it back.

"She let go!" The tall guy in the beat-up baseball cap got there first. "Everybody saw it!"

"I did not!"

The guy next to her stepped right in. Broad shoulders, clearly an athlete. "She never let go. You blind?"

"Bro, you’re her boyfriend. You don’t get a vote."

"And you do?"

At the end of the line was a big Black guy with a round face and a T-shirt the size of a bedsheet. He kept one hand on the pelican and raised the other to the crowd. "Ladies and gentlemen, can we go to the replay?"

The crowd cracked up.

Next to him stood an Asian girl with long straight black hair and Converse sneakers who hadn’t said a word the whole time. Everybody else was arguing. She was watching. Her hand hadn’t moved.

"Guys," Kevin said into the mic. "Guys. It’s twenty-five dollars—"

Nobody listened.

Noah took a bite of pizza and shook his head. "All this over twenty-five bucks? People are insane."

Ethan wasn’t watching the stage. He was watching the crowd.

Three hundred people, at least. People holding free T-shirts, people holding pizza, people who’d only been walking past. Not one of them was leaving. The ones in back were pushing forward. Somebody was up on tiptoe.

Phones were up all over. Mostly flip phones, plus the odd high-end model like a Nokia N73, held up high like a trophy.

Off to one side of the stage, a Student Government girl in a yellow polo had a silver Canon digital camera up and recording, probably for the Welcome Week newsletter. Ethan’s eyes stayed on her a beat longer than they needed to.

He’d spent fifteen years in conference rooms watching people explain this with forty-slide decks. It only took one sentence. Nobody walks past a fight.

Two people want the same thing and only one of them gets it. That’s conflict, and conflict is the cheapest content in the world. You don’t have to pay for it. You don’t have to write it. It grows on its own.

Reality TV had lived on it for a decade. The internet was going to live on it a lot longer.

The problem on that stage wasn’t the conflict. It was the stakes. Fighting over twenty-five dollars looked dumb, so people laughed. Raise the stakes, and dumb turned into a story. Everybody watching would start picking sides: who deserved the money, who was cheating, who was going to last. Once people had a side, they didn’t leave.

He looked at the five on stage again, the way he used to look at casting tapes.

Baseball Cap loved an audience and came with his own villain lines. The protective boyfriend and the girlfriend with the short fuse: a couple, which was drama you didn’t have to build. The big guy with the round face, who the crowd already loved. And the quiet girl, who—

Her hand still hadn’t moved.

Five characters. One stage, already built. Three hundred people, already watching.

All it was missing was a camera and a big enough number.

Both of them were in his backpack.

Ethan handed his slice back to Noah, unzipped his backpack, and took out the Handycam.

"What are you doing?"

Ethan pulled off the lens cap and pushed the camera into his hands. "Film me. Twenty bucks."

"Wait. What?"

"Red button on the side. Red light means it’s recording. Keep me in frame."

Noah looked down at the camera, then at the two slices of pizza in his other hand. "Twenty now?"

Ethan’s hand went to his pocket out of habit. Empty. Every twenty he had on him was in that envelope.

"After. I’m good for it. Probably."

"That’s what they all say," Noah muttered, but he folded both slices together, clamped them in his teeth, freed up his hand, and flipped out the little screen. His thumb hovered over the button.

Then, almost without thinking, he pressed it.

The red light came on.

Ethan faced the lens and turned a little so the stage was behind him. "First day at Southern Coast. Five freshmen. One plywood pelican. Twenty-five dollars." He glanced back. Baseball Cap was jabbing a finger at the couple. "And they’re about to kill each other."

He patted the backpack.

"Let’s see if a thousand dollars fixes it."

Then he turned and walked straight toward the stage.

Noah lowered the camera for half a second.

He’d known this guy for less than three hours. Fun guy, sure, the kind who’d put you in a headlock ten seconds in like you’d been friends for a decade. But those lines into the camera just now sounded like he’d been doing it for fifteen years. Noah had no idea what his new roommate was about to do, and suddenly he really wanted to find out.

"What the—" With the pizza in his teeth it came out like a muffled curse. He brought the camera back up and jogged after him.

A skinny volunteer in another yellow polo, JOSH on his tag, stood at the bottom of the stage steps. He put out an arm. "Hey. You can’t go up there."

"Your stage is on fire. I brought a bucket."

Josh frowned. "A bucket of what?"

Ethan opened the backpack a few inches. Josh looked down and saw the envelope, and the edge of green sticking out of the top.

Josh’s arm hung there for a second.

His job was keeping drunk frat guys off the stage, and the mess up there was already more than the host could handle. Anyone walking up with an envelope full of cash had to be a sponsor or somebody important, and that was way above the pay grade of the kid on the stairs. Besides, he wanted to see it too.

He stepped aside.

Ethan climbed the steps. When Kevin saw somebody coming up, he got the look of a drowning man spotting a rope, and he didn’t even ask who it was. Ethan held out his hand, and Kevin gave him the mic.

The speaker shrieked.

The five on stage were still going. "—been on her since the start—" "—man, I’m just saying what I saw—" "—can I request a halftime—"

Ethan didn’t yell. He took the envelope out of his backpack, pulled out the stack, and fanned it with his thumb right in front of the mic. Fifty twenty-dollar bills, bright green in the afternoon sun.

Then he slapped the whole stack down on top of the speaker next to the mic stand.

Smack.

The mic carried it across the entire lawn.

The arguing stopped. On stage first, then the front row, then outward, ring by ring across the lawn. Baseball Cap’s mouth was open. The couple turned their heads at the same time. The big guy slowly lowered the hand he’d been waving at the crowd. The quiet girl finally took her eyes off everyone else and looked at the money.

Three hundred people, and not one of them made a sound. Somewhere far off, Fergie was still singing, and nobody was listening.

Ethan glanced down. Noah was dead center in the front row, pizza still in his teeth, the lens locked on him. The red light was on.

He gripped the mic and stepped forward. He didn’t raise his voice. He didn’t have to.

"The game starts over. Same rules."

He laid his hand flat on the stack of bills.

"But the prize isn’t twenty-five dollars anymore."

He let it hang for one beat, long enough for three hundred pairs of eyes to land on the money.

"Last hand on wins one thousand dollars."